A Royal Day

Just Sunday--I'm not making this up--just Sunday, Diet Eman, a 95-year-old woman, a decorated Resistance fighter originally from the Netherlands, was looking forward to Tuesday, yesterday, when the King and Queen of the Netherlands were going to be stopping in her adopted hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She hoped she could meet him and give him a copy of her book, Things We Couldn't Say. 

Twice--I'm not making this up either--twice she told the same story, once just to me when we were waiting for the show to begin, and once a bit later to the crowd who'd gathered at Master Arts Theater to talk with her about the book and the play the theater has been running--sold out too!--for several weeks. 

Here's the story.  A child, she said, was somehow given the privilege of meeting with Dutch royalty some years ago when an earlier King came to the States for a visit. Impulsively, childishly, typically, the kid, an American kid, pulled out a piece of paper and asked for an autograph. Ms. Eman pulled a face as if to say that it was something absolutely not done in Holland. There's ancient protocols, after all.

"She didn't know that you don't speak to Royalty unless spoken to," she told me, and then, later, to the whole crowd that had gathered. "And we have all these rules," she said, including not turning your back on the King, but walking backwards out of his presence if given the blessing of meeting him or the Queen. 

I never understood royalty romance, Dutch or Brit. We dumped on King George in 1776, after all. "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations," saith our Declaration of Independence, "all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." Shoot, in America we skewer Presidents long before they get into office. Walk backwards out of the room? Get a life. Don't touch him or her? Are they porcelain?

Anyway, in the story Diet Eman told, the king demurred in a kindly fashion, she said, too busy and too royal, I guess, to be signing autographs. 

"Aw, come on," the American kid said. And then the kid actually elbowed the King. Diet broke out in forbidden laughter then covered her lips with her fingers as if someone had just passed gas. "Can you imagine?" she said. "We just don't touch royalty," she told the whole crowd. It was a joke. She loved the story, loved telling it. The King gave in and signed his autograph.

I don't know exactly what happened yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but a single photograph makes it very clear that the new King and Queen of the Netherlands broke royal codes themselves because in this great picture what's perfectly clear is that protocol was dumped because that's him--that's the King of the Netherlands--actually holding hands with Diet Eman on their way to visit the Meijer Gardens. 

A quarter century ago, when she told me her Resistance story in exacting and often horrifying detail, I remember her telling me how she felt when she heard her Queen had left the Netherlands for England once the Nazi occupation began. "She was our mother!" she told me. A very young Diet Eman had been absolutely heartbroken. Right then and there, fifty years after the fact, her eyes grew shiny with tears.

I didn't get it. Still don't, really. 

But what I know when I see this news shot is that yesterday, in Ms. Eman's life, was like none other. Look at those hands, and he's the King.